RationalWiki:Fundraiser

Another year in the books for RationalWiki. There are many ways to try to calculate success. You can look at articles written, active users, daily visitors, or – as I talked about last year – lawsuits filed by charlatans and cranks. However, this year I want to talk about something truly mundane: a true lack of excitement. Way back in our history, a link to RationalWiki from a news article or a front-page Reddit post was an earth-shattering ordeal. It was awesomely exciting – and usually crashed the site! Nowadays, I just get an e-mail warning that one of our servers has exceeded a predefined activity threshold.

We have become part of the background of the Internet. We are regularly sourced in news articles, Reddit is rife with links back to us, and blog posts all call back to our articles. It is no longer a “new” thing to be noticed. I started to realize just how ubiquitous we were this year when I started seeing random friends from high school respond to articles on Facebook with links to our site and when my students started trying to use RationalWiki as a source for their papers. We are a fundamental part of the backdrop of rationality in our world, and it is needed now more than ever!

And this brings us to our annual fundraiser. This website is COMPLETELY supported by our users. Without you and your generous donations we would be offline and gone for good. We try to keep these fundraisers to a minimum so you can go about doing your amazing work uninterrupted. The sooner we reach the goal, the sooner this banner disappears for another year.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us in the past and supports us in the future!